20/20 airing special on "Age of Consent"

Wow, my little psychic antennae must be onto something ... as many of you may know I'm a big John Stossel fan (though I don't agree with him on everything), and I'm thrilled to see that he, too, is attacking the Sex Offender hysteria in his upcoming special "Age of Consent," which I just found out about today. I couldn't find a link to it on the Web but I got this from the "Give Me a Break!" e-mail (that I get on Thursdays). Love or hate Mr. Mustache, but I am very THANKFUL that someone so high profile is finally saying ENOUGH ALREADY!:

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John Stossel: "Give Me a Break!"

This Friday on "20/20" at 10 p.m. ET, we preview my next special, Age of Consent, airing next Friday, March 14.

Our government wants to protect our children from sexual predators. States have passed laws to try to keep molesters far away. But as so often happens with so many laws, there are unintended consequences.

For people like Frank Rodriguez, whose story we will tell Friday, the net traps and doesn't let go.

Frank and Nikki were high school sweethearts. He was a senior and she was his freshman girlfriend. This relationship caused him to end up on the Texas state sex registry list.

It happened because Nikki's mom, like most mothers, was not pleased when she found out her daughter was having sex. One night during a fight, Nikki's mother took Nikki down to the police station and filed charges against Frank. He was 19; she was 15. In Texas the legal age of consent is 16… And so began Frank's endless entanglement with the U.S. legal system.

The next morning, after tempers simmered, Nikki's mom tried to drop the charges, but the police said it was too late. Even though Nikki said that the sex "was her idea," that Frank was her boyfriend, and that everything was consensual, none of that mattered: the law was the law. Rather than face a possible 20 year prison sentence, Frank took a plea deal that gave him 7 years probation. The plea bargain kept him out of prison but it gave him a different kind of life sentence — life as a registered sex offender. Frank had to move away from his family into mobile home, because his 12 year old sister lived in the family home and he was not permitted to be near her. He had to get special permission from a judge to watch his brother play high school football because there were kids at the game.

Today, Frank and Nikki are married. They have four daughters together, but that doesn't matter in the eyes of the law. On the Texas state registry, Frank will be branded for life as a sex offender. How is that just?

Next week we will spend the full hour on sex and the age of consent.